Shannon Bell / Fluid Truth
Fluid Truth1
Shannon Bell
Female Ejaculation—“shooting hot sticky liquid out of one’s urethral with great velocity”
(Bell, 2010, 39)—is the political female body event of the late twentieth and twenty-first
centuries. That is, if politics and the political are understood the way in which Jacques
Rancière understands them: as “an intervention in the visible and the sayable” which
makes “what was unseen visible” and “what was audible as mere noise heard as speech”
(Rancière, 2010, pp. 37-8). And, if event, a la Alain Badiou, is taken to be an unsuspected
eruption that ruptures the routine operation of power, in this case the hegemonic
heterosexual male point of view and the sexuated body-politic of language and culture
underpinning the knowledge of what a male and a female body can do. This essay will
use key concepts formulated by two of the currently most influential French
philosophers—Alain Badiou and Jacques Rancière—to present the truth event of female
ejaculation. A not unimportant secondary objective is to show the fluid applicability of
high theory to sites not imagined by the originators of the theory.
The radical feminist philosopher Catharine MacKinnon contends, “The male perspective
is systematic and hegemonic. … [M]ost men adhere to it, nonconsciously and without
considering it a point of view, … because it makes sense of their experience [and]
because it is in their interest. It is rational for them” (MacKinnon, 1989, p. 114). This
systematic and hegemonic male perspective can be taken as equivalent to what
Rancière identifies as the “logic of arkhê” which “presupposes that a determinate
superiority is exercised over an equally determinate inferiority” (2010, p. 31). The “logic of
arkhê” is at the core of what Rancière terms “the police”, operating as the opposite of
politics. He notes, “For a political subject – and therefore for politics – to come to pass, it
is necessary to break with this logic” (2010, p. 30). Politics or democracy works “as a
rupture in the logic of arkhê” (2010, p. 31); “Politics,” the way Rancière sees it, is
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the activity that breaks with the order of the police by inventing new
subjects … new forms of collective enunciation … new ways of making
sense of the sensible, new configurations between the audible and the
inaudible, new distributions of space and time – in short, new bodily
capacities. (2010, p. 139)
Female Ejaculator (FE) Militant Subjects
One of the political subjects that ruptures the logic of arkhê and the police sexual order
is the ejaculating female subject, traversing the process of what Alain Badiou a la Jacques
Lacan terms subjectivization—in the first instance, through a hysterical cut into, a noisy
disruption, of hegemonic heterosexuality. This first cut was the body disturbances and
genital mucous secretions documented by Sigmund Freud in his work with Dora and the
neurasthenic female ejaculators that Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebing found among a
female prison population and documented in Psychopathia Sexualis. While these subjects
were not mute in terms of the noise of resistance, they were not speaking militant
political subjects. Rather, they were spoken about in dominant psychoanalytic and
sexological discourses. Subjectivization, as understood by Badiou, “is that through which
a truth is possible” (2005, p. 393). For Badiou there are three dimensions to a truthprocess: the event, the fidelity and the truth. As Badiou states: “For the process of truth
to begin, something must happen” (Badiou, 2002, lecture). The truth process of female
ejaculation began when Female Ejaculator (FE) militant subjects, such as myself (Shannon
Bell) and Deborah Sundahl, started to and continue to speak on female ejaculation
publically by teaching workshops, writing texts, producing our own films and doing
documentary footage for television documentaries, such as Gilles Boyon and Segolene
Hanotaux’s 2011 documentary film, G-Spotting: A Story of Pleasure and Promise.
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Female ejaculation is an event for feminist thought and sexuality in much the same way
that “Marx is an event for political thought because he designates, under the name
"proletariat", the central void of early bourgeois societies” (Badiou, 2001, p. 69).
Bell and Sundahl, and other FE militant subjects such as Annie Sprinkle and Carol Queen,
designate under the name of "female ejaculation" the central void of female sexuality. It
is this void that MacKinnon, through radical feminism, positions as the absence on which
male sexuality is grounded:
women is identified as a being who identifies and is identified as one
whose sexuality exists for someone else, who is socially male. What is
termed women’s sexuality is the capacity to arouse desire in that
someone. (1989, p. 118)
MacKinnon poses the question: “If what is sexual about a woman is what the male point
of view requires for excitement, for arousal and satisfaction, have male requirements so
usurped its terms to have become them?” (1989, p. 118). Consciousness-raising, the
method of radical feminism, showed female sexuality under male control to be negation
of self as subject: “Man fucks woman; subject verb object” (1989, p. 124).
In 1989, the same year in which MacKinnon’s Toward a Feminist Theory of the State was
published, the ejaculating female began her collective enunciation, presenting images
and texts initially inside a queer feminist discourse. [See Appendix I: Female Ejaculation
Event 1988-2012].This, in retrospect, became the event of female ejaculation which
brought “to pass ‘something other’ than the situation, opinions, instituted knowledges”
(Badiou, 2001, p. 67) that predominated concerning what a female body could do. The
Female Ejaculation event was a “hazardous, unpredictable supplement” (Badiou, 2001, p.
67); “a multiple on the edge of the void” (Badiou, 2005, p. 202).
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Gilles Boyon and Segolene Hanotaux’s 2011 documentary film, G-Spotting: A Story of
Pleasure and Promise, featuring footage from a workshop with me, broadcast on French
and Swedish television and screened at the International Documentary Film Festival
Amsterdam (IDFA) in November 2012, is one of the latest inscribing and naming of “the
situated void of that for which it is an event” (Badiou, 2001, p. 69); it is an act of fidelity.
Recall that, for Badiou, the event is both situated and supplementary, never fully
decidable, “one-multiple made up of … all the multiples that belong to its site … and the
event itself” (Badiou, 2005, p. 179). Fidelity “amounts to a sustained investigation of the
situation [female sexuality] under the imperative of the event [female ejaculation] itself”
(Badiou, 2001, p. 67). Boyon and Hanotaux, in their promotional abstract for the IDFA
screening of G-Spotting: A Story of Pleasure and Promise, repose their work as a fidelity to
previous investigations into the G-spot and female ejaculation:
G-spotting is a joyful and surprising film, with colorful characters,
exploring science, sexual liberation, ideological conflicts, and of course ...
pleasure. How, in 2010, can there still exist myths around female sexuality?
How can the simple mention of this erogenous zone provoke such
argument, doubt, and salacious laughter? How can a simple erogenous
zone mysteriously denominated as the "G-Spot" be known to all yet ... noone (or almost no-one) knows its location, its physiology or the story of its
discovery? G-spotting is an investigation into the heart of the fascinating
world of scientific sexology. (IDFA, n.d.)
G-Spotting “gathers together and produces” (Badiou, 2001, p. 68) what is now broadly
accepted as the truth about female genital anatomy and the female body’s capacity for
female ejaculation, this time for a broader television audience. The truth of the female
body’s sexual capacity “punches a ‘hole’ in knowledges, it is heterogeneous to them, but
it is also the … source of new knowledges” (Badiou, 2001, 70). Badiou continues: “We
shall say that the truth forces knowledges” (2001, p. 70). "Force" indicates that a new
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truth comes into being “by violating established and circulating knowledges” (Badiou,
2001, p. 70) . G-Spotting pitched by Boyon and Hanotaux as "a joyful and surprising film,
with colorful characters," perhaps to sell it to television networks, is in its publicity an
understated approach to "forcing new bits of knowledge". In the film the female body
capacity for ejaculation is confirmed by Dr. Francisco Santamaria Cabello as he discusses
the presence of PSA [prostate specific antigen] in female ejaculate and post-orgasm
urine. Cabello’s laboratory research found that all women whose pre- and post-orgasm
urine his team tested have PSA in urine after orgasm, even if they do not know that they
ejaculate. The film transitions from Cabello’s laboratory work to the FE workshops I teach,
primarily
at
Come
As
Your
Are
(http://www.comeasyouare.com/toronto-store-
information/sex-workshops/)2. The film narrator states: “Thanks to Cabello the field of
sexology is no longer in the dark about the anatomy of squirting.” Then the narrator
qualifies: “But his discovery that all women might be capable of ejaculation is something
that has been well known in some subcultures for many years.” Of course, these
subcultures are queer feminist communities
Female Ejaculation Force
I wrote the first set of instructions on how to female ejaculate in “Q: What Shoots and
Sprays, Shoots and Sprays, Shoots and Sprays? A: A Woman” published, as the feature
article for the International Women’s Day issue of the lesbian magazine Rites in 1989.3
The issue included black and white images of me doing two different types of female
ejaculation – the spurting gush and the jet stream – and two texts, one which traced the
genealogy of female ejaculation and one entitled “The Everywoman’s Guide to
Ejaculation”, which provided step-by-step directions on how to ejaculate:
Step One: Find what has come to be known as your G-spot; don’t call it
that, it is named after Gräfenberg, a man. It is the muscle and spongy
tissue around that part of your urethra that is on the top wall of your
vagina. It is about half a finger (more or less) inside your vagina and about
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a finger across – about two inches. If the muscles that go around your
vagina have not been used too much (mine weren’t) they have to be built
up. The muscles can be built up by doing contractions: pressing the top of
your vagina against the bottom and releasing. DON’T WORRY: Strong
muscles will not hold the penis in place; they will push it out when your
ducts get full and you want to shoot.
Step Two: Using whichever hand you usually masturbate with, take two or
three fingers and rub them against the part of your urethra inside your
vagina. Press hard and notice the feeling of having to pee. You don’t, this
is the signal that you are ready to ejaculate. Now, place the middle finger
slightly below the external part of your urethra and begin to masturbate
the same way you rub your clit. As you are doing this you will notice the
two ducts, one at each side of your urethra, feel full and perhaps
somewhat painful; you have another 30 or so ducts scattered in the
urethral sponge on the top wall of your vagina. Once you get into the
body feeling you may be able to locate them externally on your lower
abdomen. They are located in a pyramid from your clit to just near your
ovaries.
Step Three: Take your other hand and press down on one or more of the
ducts from the outside. Push your urethra out and push the way you do
when you pee. A crucial aspect of ejaculating is that it is necessary to
PUSH OUT. Liquid will come shooting out perhaps in a steady stream or
jet.
I can ejaculate only in positions in which I can push my entire pelvis out
and up: on my knees with legs a foot and a half apart; on my back with
my ass raised up, weight distributed on my feet and shoulders, and knees
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at least two feet apart; squatting, standing, again with feet far enough
apart so I can push my urethra up and out. As a veteran ejaculator,
following stimulation on my urethra and urethral sponge I can ejaculate
by just pushing out.
If your partner is female, you may be able to help her ejaculate. As you
stimulate her anterior vaginal wall and the exterior part of her urethra, get
her to push out when she is ready. You will both feel the glands and ducts
around the urethra swelling and filling with liquid.
What ejaculation will do for you sexually is to give you a powerful
kinesthetic, visual, and auditory experience – a total body experience. You
can repeat it almost indefinitely once your body awakens to it. Seeing and
hearing your body fluid put out fire gives one a whole new relation to the
environment.
The ejaculate changes in amount, color, odor and taste during your
menstrual cycle. At ovulation the fluid is very hot (it corresponds to your
vaginal temperature), thick, yellowish and pungent. Following ovulation
the fluid is thinner, there is more of it, it is clear and pleasantly salty. It
remains this way until bleeding starts at which point it is again thick for
the first day or so. It then returns to being clear and copious. I have found
that ejaculation during ovulation – because it reduces vaginal temperature
– reduces yeast infections that result from the increase in vaginal
temperature at ovulation.4
Later in 1989, filmmaker Kath Daymond and I did Nice Girls Don’t Do It, the first film on
female ejaculation.5 It was a 13-minute truth pastiche of knowledge, porn and technical
instruction.
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This is not to say that female ejaculation did not exist before the end of the 1980s. On
the contrary, female ejaculation has a long history. Following the 1980s queer feminist
female ejaculation event this history has been retrospectively reformulated as the
popular culture genealogical fidelity of female ejaculation. Make no mistake, if queer
feminist political militants had not ruptured the old order of female sexuality with new
knowledge and practices, female ejaculation would not be an event. Rather, female
ejaculation would have continued to suffer the fate of what Michel Foucault termed
“subjugated knowledge”: it would appear for a moment now and then in a specific
discourse (philosophy, medicine, pornography, sexology) only to be submerged out of
view for extended periods of time throughout history.
Postevental Genealogical Fidelity of Female Ejaculation6
Female ejaculation has been the object of medical and philosophical discourses since the
early Greeks, with the meanings ascribed to it varying considerably over the course of
Western history. Female ejaculation has typically been framed in five ways: as fecundity;
sexual pleasure; social deviance; medical pathology; and as a scientific problem. Aristotle,
in the Generation of Animals, connected female fluid with pleasure:
Some think that the female contributes semen in coition because the
pleasure she experiences is sometimes similar to that of the male, and
also is attended by a liquid discharge. But this discharge is not seminal …
The amount of this discharge when it occurs is sometimes on a different
scale from the emission of semen and far exceeds it. (1912, II, 28a)
The expulsion of female fluids during sexual excitement was taken by many preEnlightenment thinkers to be a normal and pleasurable part of female sexuality. Well into
the eighteenth century, what cultural historian Thomas Laqueur terms the "one-sex
model" predominated. In this model, male and female are seen as versions of one
another, both in the anatomical sense that the vagina is an internal penis, and in the
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physiological sense that the fluids in men and women are interchangeable.7 Perhaps the
greatest controversy within the one-sex model was between one-seed and two-seed
theories of generation, which revolved around whether female fluids were progenitive.
Hippocrates and Galen argued for the existence of the female seed, Aristotle that the
fluid was pleasurable but not progenitive (Laqueur, 1990, pp.40-2).
Throughout the Middle Ages, Western scholars remained faithful to Hippocrates and
Galen’s notion of female sperm, which came to them through Arabic medicine. In the
sixteenth century, Italian anatomist Renaldus Columbus linked the clitoris with semen,
ejaculation and pleasure: “If you rub it vigorously with a penis, or touch it even with a
little finger, semen swifter than air flies this way and that on account of the pleasure”
(cited in Laqueur, 1990, p. 66). Female-to-female instruction is present in seventeenthcentury whore dialogue, an early genre of erotic writing that combines pornographic
tales with educational instruction in which an older woman teaches a young virgin about
the female sex organ. In a dialogue between Tullia and her younger cousin Octavia, they
discuss female ejaculation:
Tullia: Towards the upper Part of the C__t, is a thing they call Clitoris;
which is a little like a Man’s P___k, for it will send forth a Liquor, which
when it comes away, leaves us in a Trance, as if we were dying, all our
Senses being lost, and our Eyes shut[.]
Octavia: You describe Things so exactly, that me thinks I see all that is
within me. (Chorier, [1660.], p. 11–12)
The seventeenth-century Dutch anatomist Regnier de Graaf, in his New Treatise
Concerning the Generative Organs of Women, outlined the Hippocratic and Aristotelian
controversy over female semen, in which he sided with the Aristotelians and denied the
existence of female semen. In describing the ejection of female fluid, de Graaf wrote: “it
should be noted that the discharge from the female prostatae causes as much pleasure
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as does that from the male prostatae” ([1672], p. 107). He identified the source of the
fluid as the “ducts and lacunae … around the orifice of the neck of the vagina and the
outlet of the urinary passage [which] receive their fluid from the female prostatae, or
rather the thick membranous body around the urinary passage” ([1672], p. 107). De Graaf
was the first person to name and describe the female prostate (Zaviacic, 1999, p. 17).
As the similarities between male and female bodies gave way to their differences, and
semen became the sole property of the male body, the capacity of the female body to
ejaculate – although still present and documented in medical writings and literature –
was predominantly described as a less-than-normal occurrence.
By the nineteenth century, female fluids were linked with disease. Alexander Skene, who
in 1880 identified the two ducts on each side of the urethral opening, was concerned
with the problem of draining the glands and the ducts surrounding the female urethra
when they became infected. The Skene glands and the urethra hence became important
to the medical profession as potential sites of venereal disease and infection, and not as
loci of pleasure.
The ejaculation of female fluids also came to be associated with a deviant sexual
population and practice. In Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebing’s well-known study of
sexual perversion, Psychopathia Sexualis, he identifies female ejaculation as the
pathology of a lesbian subgroup within a deviant group – the female prison population.
Under the heading of “Congenital Sexual Inversion in Women”, Krafft-Ebing discusses
sexual contact among women. He writes: “The intersexual gratification among … women
seems to be reduced to kissing and embraces, which seems to satisfy those of weak
sexual instinct, but produces in sexually neurasthenic females ejaculation” (1965, p. 265).
According to Krafft-Ebing, ejaculation only occurs among women who suffer
neurasthenia – body disturbances (or orgasms) – caused by weakness of the nervous
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system. Krafft-Ebing relates female ejaculation to a nervous disability, a feature
corroborated by Freud in his analysis of Dora. Freud makes a connection between Dora’s
hysterical symptoms and the secretion of female fluids, and links “abnormal secretions”
with hysteria.
The pride taken by some women in the appearance of their genitals is
quite a special feature of their vanity; and disorders of genitals which they
think calculated to inspire feelings of repugnance or even disgust have an
incredible power of humiliating them, of lowering their self-esteem.… An
abnormal secretion of the mucous membrane of the vagina is looked
upon as a source of disgust. (Freud, [1905], p. 121)
As female ejaculation was being pathologised by the medical profession, psychoanalysis
and the burgeoning sexology industry, female ejaculation surfaced in Victorian male
pornographic discourse. The Pearl, a two-volume journal of Victorian short stories,
poems, letters and ballads, contains depictions of female ejaculation misinterpreted by
Steven Marcus in The Other Victorians as “the ubiquitous projection of the male sexual
fantasy onto the female response – the female response being imagined as identical with
the male … and there is the usual accompanying fantasy that they ejaculate during
orgasm” (1966, p. 194)
The clearest and most complete description of the physiological process and anatomical
structure of female ejaculation was published in the International Journal of Sexology
(1950) by Ernst Gräfenberg, a German obstetrician and gynecologist. Gräfenberg
observed that:
An erotic zone always could be demonstrated on the anterior wall of the
vagina along the course of the urethra. … Analogous to the male urethra,
the female urethra also seems to be surrounded by erectile tissues. … In
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the course of sexual stimulation, the female urethra begins to enlarge and
can be felt easily. It swells out greatly at the end of orgasm. …
Occasionally the production of fluids … [is] profuse. … If there is the
opportunity to observe … one can see that large quantities of a clear
transparent fluid are expelled … out of the urethra in gushes. (1950, p.
148)
Despite the descriptions of it in medical, philosophical and pornographic literature
throughout Western history, and in spite of Gräfenberg’s work, female ejaculation was
ignored or denied by the dominant discourses – in Rancière’s terms, the discourses of
the police order – defining female sexuality until the 1980s. This preevental genealogy of
female ejaculation had been one of discovery, disappearance and rediscovery reclaimed
and popularised after the event.
Female Ejaculation: The Event8
What happened in the 1980s was the feminist sexual equivalent of the Apostle Paul’s
conversion on the road to Damascus. The hysterics of Dora et al. converts into the
politics of Bell et al.; the hysterical subject converts into the militant subject. While female
bodies have ejaculated throughout history, Female Ejaculation was not a truth-event
until it was enunciated in multiple sites of queer feminist discourse that collectively and
retrospectively rendered obsolete the hegemonic markings of the female body as
submissive to the pleasures and desires of the male body. As Badiou notes, “the event
renders prior markings obsolete” (2003, p. 23).
Female ejaculation is an incredibly powerful experience and image of the sexual female
body. To see fluid shooting with velocity and force out of the glands and ducts that
surround the urethra – what is called the “urethral sponge” of the clitoris, now officially
the “female prostate” – through the vaginal opening, provides a new script for female
sexuality and repositions the female body as powerful, active and autonomous. Female
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ejaculation educator Deborah Sundahl suggests, “[t]his is connectable to a broadening of
women’s social and sexual roles” (Bell, 1995, p. 273). I say, “[t]he visual image of female
ejaculation relieves the phallus of its patriarchal burden” (1995, p. 273-4).
A New Female Body
The paradigm shift in knowledge about and representations of female sexuality began
with A New View of a Woman’s Body (1981), compiled by the Federation of Feminist
Women’s Health Centers (FWHC), which in a brilliant political move redefined the clitoris,
extending its visible external structure, the glans of the clitoris, to incorporate the
internal spongy erectile tissue on the top and bottom vaginal walls. The FWHC named
the tissue on the top wall of the vagina the "urethral sponge" and the spongy tissue on
the bottom wall, the "perineal sponge" (1991, p. 43–5) During sexual excitement, the
urethral and perineal sponges become engorged and erect; the paraurethral glands and
ducts in the urethral sponge fill with prostatic and other fluid which can be ejaculated
through the urethra. From Badiou’s point of view this shift would not constitute simply a
new view of a pre-existing body; rather, it would constitute a new body, something like
the manner in which the church is the newly reconstituted body of Christ for Paul the
Apostle.
The FWHC’s A New View of a Woman’s Body provided drawings of the clitoral structure
in flaccid and erect states. These drawings make apparent the similarity in size and
structure of the male and female sex organs. Directed by Mary Jane Sherfey’s 1972 pointby-point comparison of clitoral and penile anatomy, the FWHC rediscovered and defined
the female clitoris pragmatically through consciousness-raising sessions and shared
intimate experiences which included participants taking off their clothes to compare
genital anatomy and documenting each other masturbating. By doing so they acquired
the practical knowledge presented in Susan Gage’s now-famous anatomical illustrations
of the urethral sponge of the clitoris, complete with erectile tissue and paraurethral
glands and ducts (Chalker, 2000, p. 33–4)
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In The G-Spot (1981), Alice Ladas, Beverly Whipple and John Perry extended the
paradigm shift of the new view of the female body into the realm of heterosexual
popular culture, coining the term "G-spot" after Gräfenberg to refer to the urethral
sponge. The G-spot had wider currency than the urethral sponge as it implies a secret
spot that, once located, will unleash the female body’s possibilities for pleasure.
The authors describe the G-spot as “a spot inside the vagina that is extremely sensitive to
deep pressure. It lies on the anterior wall of the vagina … when properly stimulated, the
Gräfenberg spot swells and leads to orgasm in many women” (1981, p. 21–2). The G-Spot
makes two significant contributions to contemporary studies on female ejaculation: 1) it
presents the female sexual organ as a unified organ, leaving behind the artificial division
of the female genitals into clitoris and vagina which was so popular with Freud, Kinsey
and Masters and Johnson, in which either vaginal or clitoral orgasms were privileged; and
2) it popularises female ejaculation, although it doesn’t disclose how to do it.
The third key contribution – though first chronologically – to the paradigm shift in
understanding and representing the female sex organ was by Josephine Sevely, who in
1978 coauthored with J. W. Bennett the first article on female ejaculation and the female
prostate, “Concerning Female Ejaculation and the Female Prostate”, in the Journal of Sex
Research. Sevely and Bennett claimed that the tissue surrounding the female urethra was
the same as that surrounding the male urethra and contained thirty or more prostatic
glands. They also provided the lost genealogy of female ejaculation, from ancient
philosophy and medicine until 1950s sexology.
Sevely extended her theories about female sexuality into Eve’s Secrets (1987), but it never
achieved the popularity of The G-Spot. Eve’s Secrets emphasises the simultaneous
involvement of the clitoris, urethra and vagina (the CUV) as a single integrated sex organ.
The implications of this theory are twofold: first, a woman’s sexual organ is viewed as an
integrated whole, not split between clitoral activity and vaginal passivity; second, the
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"anatomical alternative" between male and female genitals is challenged by a "new"
construction of anatomical symmetry. Both female and male bodies have prostate gland
structures and both have the potential to ejaculate fluids during sexual stimulation. The
female body can ejaculate fluid from thirty or more ducts and with stimulation it can
ejaculate repeatedly. It can ejaculate more fluid than the male body and enjoy a plurality
of genital pleasure sites: the clitoris, urethra, vagina, the vaginal entrance, the top and
bottom walls of the vagina and the cervix.
We now know that the female sex organ is identical to the male’s in structure and
function – that is, the urethral sponge is capable of anywhere from a three to eight inch
erection, measures a handful in circumference, and that prostatic and other bodily fluids
are ejaculated from the paraurethral glands and ducts through the urethra. What then is
it that prevents recognition of body symmetry and body equality? Quite likely a large
part of this lack of recognition is due to the historical invisibility of the female sex organ
as an integrated unit and the subsequent lack of symmetry in our male-dominated
cultures of naming, or the symbolic encoding of the female and male sex organs.
Terminology is important. Milan Zaviacic, professor of Pathology and Forensic Medicine
at the Comenius University of Bratislava in Slovakia, fought for twenty years to get the
International Committee on Anatomical Terminology to recognise the female prostate as
a functioning anatomical structure:
It appears to be illogical to use the term prostate for the tissue in the male
and a different term (Skene’s glands and ducts of paraurethral glands and
ducts) for the same tissue in the female. The use of the term Skene’s
paraurethral glands and ducts wrongly implies that some other structure
rather than the prostate is involved. (Zaviacic, 1999, p. 120)
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Naming is important. There are significant power differentials inherent in the naming of
the female sex organ: alternately the urethral sponge, G-spot, female prostate and what I
choose to name it – the female phallus.9
In the video How to Female Ejaculate (1992), Sundahl conducts a cervical selfexamination. She shows the internal erection by turning the speculum sideways and
inserting it inside the vagina. It is only with the turning of the speculum that the full
internal and external clitoris becomes fully visible, thus also turning the female sex from
the absence of "nothing to see" into the presence of "something to see". The speculum,
a technology developed by gynecologists to facilitate viewing of the cervix,
simultaneously exposes the neck of the womb and obscures the female phallus. That is,
until it is turned. The feminist turn of the technology for viewing a woman’s sex
generates a whole new truth of the female body, a whole new female body.
Something to See: Making the Unseen Visible
Lying down on the floor, my cunt elevated on a plush red pillow, I turned the speculum
sideways and slipped it inside. Tejal, the stunningly handsome boy/girl host, illuminated
my erection with a flashlight as the twenty or so Mumbai dykes, femmes and transmen
looked at what was once "nothing to see". Some slipped on a surgical glove and slid a
couple of fingers inside to stimulate my swelling hardness. The consensus was that
although everyone had previously felt the female phallus in full and partial fisting
activities, its visual magnitude had previously remained invisible.
The visibility of the internal erection repositions the top wall of the vagina, specifically
the spongy erectile tissue and the glands and ducts surrounding the urethra, as a female
phallus. It turns out that the phantom female cock haunting psychoanalysis is an actual
cock; Freud’s little girls’ so-called hallucinations were actually body-knowledge of the
presence of a real penis, always already there, awaiting the appropriate technology and
action – a turned speculum – to come into view.
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Female Ejaculation Dissensus in Consensus
If you Google female ejaculation, as I just did on 1 March, 2014, approximately
7,350,000 results come up. I always argued that once female ejaculation entered queer
feminist discourse, its knowledge would never be lost again and indeed it hasn’t been.
What I did not foresee was the appropriation of female ejaculation into dominant
heterophallic discourses reinforcing a “male-centered, heteronormative model of human
sexuality” (Chalker, 2000, p. 14).
On the one hand, there is something magnificent and fantastic about the virtual
explosion of ejaculation knowledge; however, perhaps in much of this knowledge, fidelity
to the pure power of female ejaculation is missing, especially if female ejaculation is
presented as something one can make woman do and/or a sexual act that enhances the
desire of the other. MacKinnon contends: “Anything women have claimed as their own –
motherhood, athletics, traditional men’s jobs, lesbianism, feminism – is made specifically
sexy, dangerous, provocative, punished, made men’s in pornography” (1989, pp.138–9),
and I would add, in sexology. At one end of this male-stream continuum are males who
demand ejaculation in their face as evidence of a hot sexual encounter. At the other
extreme are those who have "emotional issues" with ejaculation – they can’t stand the
mess, odor or power. Male sexologists busy themselves with analysing the fluid,
inventing gadgets for sighting the erect urethral sponge, producing cross-sections of the
urethral glands and its ducts and rediscovering the female prostate.
Pornography and sexology sites of knowledge tend to be heterophallic, diminishing
female ejaculation by portraying it as yet another activity that the female body can
engage in for the exotic spectacle and pleasure of her real or cyber male partners, and,
moreover, as something that the in-the-know man should be able to "facilitate" in his
partner. As sociologist Ken Plummer points out, “[m]ost stories that ‘take off’ in a culture
do so because they slot easily into the most accepted narratives of that society: the
dominant ideological code” (1995, p. 115).
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In Rancière’s terms, the “logic of arkhê” re-solidifies; politics is reduced to consensus
when female ejaculation is encoded inside old representative regimes. Yet the fluid
beauty and power of female ejaculation ruptures the representative regime in which it
has been positioned. In any porn or sexology site there is a dissensus, a conflict between
the sensory ejaculating female body and that particular regime’s way of making sense of
it; “a conflict between sense and sense” (Rancière, 2010, p. 139, original emphasis).
Extreme sex site FuckingMachines.com, for example, makes this blatantly obvious. On the
one hand, you have the opening blurb:
Fucking Machines is machines fucking squirting pussies with extreme
insertions.
FuckingMachines.com is where you'll find women fucked by huge dildos
strapped to sex machines that fuck hard, featuring real female orgasms
and girls squirting cum. Hardcore machine fucking guarantees that hot
girls get off, with custom built sex machines designed for one purpose: to
make women cum hard. Experienced porn star sluts and first time girls get
fucked by robotic sex machines and hard cock on camera in high
definition with downloads or streaming video at speeds up to 350 RPM.
(Kink.com, 2013)
On the other hand, the site exposes the campiness of hegemonic porn discourse by
stating that it is “the machines [that] fuck the squirt right out of the girls pussies”. Squirt
Olympics star Sindee Jennings “cums a rocket streams of squirt and over 10-feet shot”
and every machine is “at full speed” (Kink.com, 2009). There is not a little hot irony in
women talking dirty to steel: “Fuck, fuck, bastard, shit, fuck me”. Oddly, the absence of
the carbon-based, prone-to-malfunction male porn prop goes practically unnoticed. The
women’s performance, however, is record setting: the top squirt distance is 16 feet,
speed is determined by how long the contestant can keep the hyper-metal machine stars
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going at full throttle, 350 RPM, before expulsion, and at the ejaculate filling-station
women have one minute to fill a pint (Kink.com, 2009).
The action-image of female ejaculation is a spectacular rupturing of almost any
hegemonic porn discourse in which it is located, producing a conflict between sensory
regimes – that is, between representation grounded in the hegemonic “logic of arkhê”
and the aesthetic regime of politics that makes visible a new truth, in this case, a new
truth about what a female body can do. This “rupture in the relationship between sense
and sense” – between what is enacted and what is seen, “between what is seen and what
is thought, and between what is thought and what is felt” (Rancière, 2010, p. 143) (porn
viewer thought: she is doing it for me) – is so pronounced that, I would argue, female
ejaculation – shooting hot sticky liquid out of the glands and ducts that surround one’s
urethra, through the urethra, with great velocity, again and again and again, trumping
the male body again and again, hyperdeflating the prized male money shot in porn,
flooding the image market with female fluid –breaks any “regime of meaning” (Rancière,
2010, p. 144) in which it finds itself. The very sight of female ejaculation puts sexuated
male and female bodies at risk: corporeal bodies of multiple genders have the same
erectile and ejaculatory capacities.
Appendix I: Female Ejaculation Event 1988-2012
Film: Fatale Video, Clips (1988); Kath Daymond, Nice Girls Don’t Do It (1989/90); Fatale
Video, How to Female Ejaculate (1992); Annie Sprinkle, Sluts and Goddesses Video
Workshop (1992); House of Chicks (Dorrie Lane), The Magic of Female Ejaculation (1992);
Deborah Sundahl, Tantric Journey to Female Ejaculation: Unveiling the G-Spot and Female
Ejaculation (1998); Deborah Sundahl, Female Ejaculation for Couples (2004); Deborah
Sundahl, Female Ejaculation: The Workshop (2009); Deborah Sundahl, Female Ejaculation:
The Lecture (2012); and Gilles Boyon and Segolene Hanotaux, G Spotting: A Story of
Pleasure and Promise [documentary featuring workshop with Shannon Bell] (2011),
screened at the International Documentary Film Festival, November 2012. Audio: CBC
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radio, Ideas, “One Sex or Two?” (1995). Print: I have published articles and pictures in a
number of porn magazines: Rites (1989); Bad Attitudes (1992); Lickerish (1993); Cupido
(1990); Spectator (1991); Adam (1992); Over Forty (2000). I have written performative
essays in popular culture books: Arthur Kroker and Marilousie Kroker (eds), The Hysterical
Male (Montreal: New World Perspectives, 1991); Shannon Bell, 1995. Whore Carnival
(New York: Autonomedia, 1995); and Chapter Two of Lisa Johnson (ed.), Jane Sexes It Up:
True Confessions of Feminist Desire (New York: Seal Press, 2002); “The Female Phallus:
Something to See” in Shannon Bell, Fast Feminism (New York: Autonomedia, 2010).
Deborah Sundahl addressed a number of questions concerning female ejaculation in her
advice column “Ask Fanny”, which featured in On Our Backs throughout the early to mid
1990s. She continues to address female ejaculation questions on her website,
www.isismedia.org. In 2003, Sundahl wrote Female Ejaculation and the G-Spot (Alameda,
CA: Hunter House Inc.); the classic text on female ejaculation. It is a beautiful mesh of
female ejaculation knowledge combined with a practical approach to disseminating the
skills of female ejaculation, including excellent instructions both for the ejaculator and
her partners. It also has an extensive, up-to-date database of research documenting
practically everything ever produced on female ejaculation. Furthermore, it is written by a
woman who has over twenty years of practical experience teaching other women how to
female ejaculate.
Notes
1
Thank-you to Gad Horowitz for his expert editing skills and turns of theoretical phrase,
and to Raan Matalon for assisting in theorising aspects of Badiou and Rancière’s work.
2
E.g. Female Ejaculation and The G-Spot Workshop with Shannon Bell at Come As You
Are.The workshop focuses on demonstrating the extreme power and technique of
female ejaculation in a safe and fun atmosphere. This popular workshop begins with a
live demonstration followed by a fast female ejaculation genealogy. It concludes with
anatomy, step-by-step instructions, positions, toys, communication between partners
as well as answer any participant’s questions.
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3
This article was reprinted as “Feminist Ejaculations” in Kroker and Kroker (1991);
“Female Ejaculation—A Woman’s Ejaculation Guide,” Spectator 26(24) 1991; and
“Kvinnerspruter de ogsa! —Hvordan ejakulere?,” in Cupido 4 of 1990.
4
This originally appeared as a monologue in the video Nice Girls Don’t Do It and was first
published as “The Everywoman’s Guide to Ejaculation” in Rites 5(9) for 19 March 1989.
5
The earliest feminist representation of female ejaculation was part of a larger lesbian
erotic film, Clips, produced by Blush Entertainment Group (1988).
6
This section is developed from Chapter Two, “The Female Phallus: Something to See,” of
my book Fast Feminism (New York: Autonomedia, 2010), pp. 48-53.
7
Thomas Laqueur, featured in Ideas (1995). Laqueur is the author of Making Sex: Body
and Gender From The Greeks to Freud (Cambridge and London: Harvard University
Press, 1990).
8
This section is developed from “The Female Phallus: Something to See”, Chapter Two of
my book Fast Feminism (2010), pp. 53–6.
9
The female phallus is a different story. See Chapter Two of my book Fast Feminism, “The
Female Phallus: Something to See” (2010, pp.53–6).
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